Job, some new screening tools for order management, better search functionality, better merchandising, additional payment methods on the site. So those all contributed to the e-commerce business for the quarter. And as we think about those exclusive brands, it really is about driving the awareness so people come into Boot Barn stores.
Okay. Great. From Jim Watkins, another question on the pre-release was that wonderful merchandise margin expansion, 110 basis points. Walk through some of the drivers there and maybe what came in a little bit better than you expected.
Yeah. So as John mentioned, we had guided 30 basis points of improvement year over year on the merch margin, came in 110 basis points. The exclusive brand penetration came in about where we thought it would. And so that was added to the growth, but not the beat. And then really it was a function of the better buying economies of scale. We're continuing to see nice volume discounts from our vendors, full container buys of product.
And then separately, as the markdowns have been lower than they were a year ago or really lower than historical levels, the management of the inventory has allowed us to do better full price selling, which has contributed to some of that beat for this quarter, but just contributed to a nice strong margin, you know, and then jumping into the supply chain side of things, seeing freight rates come down just globally as we bring things in from overseas, but also some negotiations that we've had with our logistics and transportation providers and getting those contracts down, the rates of those contracts down has been a bigger tailwind than we had anticipated for the quarter. So, really nice benefits there.
As you look back over the last seven years, 700 basis points of merchandise margin expansion, you know, over that time period, the team has really done a nice job of just managing the inventory and getting the pricing where it needs to be.
Okay. Yep. Yeah. No doubt that merch margin expansion's been terrific and the gift that keeps on giving. So great work to the team on that. John, I want to just dig in on your role as CEO. So you came in as interim CEO internally from the company, November 2024, full-time CEO in 2025, May of 2025. So you've highlighted maybe some initiatives that you've sort of brought to the table as you're coming to the CEO role. I think you talked a little bit about it with the branded exclusive brand websites. But what else, what else are you doing that you think is new that investors should know about?
Yeah. There were three real focuses as I came into the role, sourcing the exclusive brands and how we marketed them and reinvigorating the work business, so those were the three adjustments that I felt strongly about coming into the role. The sourcing piece of it, and I'll start with an update there. It was the first thing when I was named interim and asked, what would you do differently? I wanted to build a proper sourcing team at Boot Barn for our exclusive brands. We had relied on agents for some time, and that had gotten us to where we were, incredible growth over the last 10 years, but it was time to build a proper sourcing team at Boot Barn. A little bit of serendipity there that we decided to do that. That was in November of last year.
And of course, Liberation Day happened and that team pivoted from gains in margin for exclusive brands to preserving margin and moving from country to country. That team is about two-thirds built and hired, and they're doing an incredible job working around the very fluid situation of tariffs each day and each week. And as that eventually abates or normalizes, they'll then pivot back to margin gains that we can have on exclusive brands, but very, very happy with the sourcing team. When it comes to exclusive brands, we will continue to market those brands as real brands. I spent my entire career on the brand side of things. This was the first retailer I had worked at.
And when I came into Boot Barn and saw the strength of Cody James, Shyanne, Idyllwind, Hawx, Rank 45, I believe that those should be marketed and treated as real brands. And so they will have their own marketing campaigns, their own awareness campaigns, their own athletes or musicians that we sponsor, and their own websites to drive the desire to come into a Boot Barn store to buy those brands. And then when it comes to the work boot business, we've made nice inroads as you see in that mid-single digit comp on the work boot side. A few different things we're doing on work. One of them dovetails with exclusive brands, a lot of digital marketing around work that we hadn't done in the past around our work business. We've brought in some new work brands that are performing well.
And then most importantly, we've re-merchandised all of the work boots in our store to be merchandised by safety toe type and by size, which we had never done. And all the exit interviews with customers, as well as talking to our store partners, it's performing incredibly well and we think that's helping with the comp as well. So, not ready to declare a victory on work yet, but a mid-single-digit comp, I'm quite happy with given the quarter.
Sure. Okay. That's encouraging. Great. So, you had mentioned tariffs, so new sourcing team having to work on that. So could you just remind the audience kind of how you've approached pricing, as it relates to tariffs? Because I think you've taken a little bit different approach than many others, and there are some changes with pricing as we even enter the new year. So.
Yep.
Review that.
We have third-party brands that we sell, and then of course we sell our own brands. Within our industry, we have MAP policy that we must adhere to and what price we can sell at. The third parties implemented price increases around tariffs last summer, and those price increases were completed by the end of August. At the end of August, we had a moment to hold lower for longer on our own brands and see if there was an increase in penetration for exclusive brands, to see what the consumer reaction was to those price increases on third-party brands. The consumer was able to absorb the price increases. We didn't see a big jump in our exclusive brand penetration.
We had one moment in time where we could raise prices prior to the holiday shopping season, mid-October. Given some of the margin we had available, as you see in our margin beat for the quarter, given how well the business was performing and my fear of disrupting the store operations team, we decided to hold exclusive brand pricing all the way through holiday. Now that we're in January, we are going to pivot to raising prices to preserve margin rate on exclusive brand. Low single-digit price increases is where we'll likely end up. We're going to look at it style by style, and hold on particular styles, increase where we need to, but we are pivoting to preserving rate post-holiday.
Okay. Great. Pivoting to the brand, I think one interesting aspect of the brand since following it, you know, since the IPO, 10 plus years now, the last five years, the team's done a great job of widening the aperture of the brand, and you've introduced this new segment called Country Lifestyle, so maybe talk about what is a Country Lifestyle customer? What are you doing to reach out to them? And what type of advertising mechanisms are drawing some of these people in today?
Yeah. We always had a core customer that was someone who either worked in agriculture, rode horses, worked on a ranch, was comfortable in that world. I always say they were very comfortable in a cowboy hat, right? I know a lot of people feel uncomfortable perhaps when they put on a cowboy hat. And we opened that aperture and started looking at just the Country Lifestyle customer. And those folks maybe drive an F-150, they drive a pickup truck, they wear a baseball cap instead of a cowboy hat. They attend NASCAR. They may attend a rodeo here or there. They like country music. And they're authentic. These are not, you know, people who are necessarily new to the lifestyle. They're authentic.
They fish, they hunt, they have a propensity to perhaps a rural type of lifestyle, but they're not traditional Western ranchers or working on a farm. And so when we look at that piece of the customer base, you end up with marketing initiatives that lean a little bit more mainstream, let's call it. So we partner with NASCAR. We partner with the NFL. We're sponsoring Stagecoach this year for the first time in Boot Barn's history. So we had not done that in the past. Sponsorships of Riley Green's tour this year is another example. And so that customer is authentic. They're just authentic to us in a different way than that core Western lifestyle customer.
Okay. You have a pop-up store at Stagecoach?
We are not going to have a pop-up store at Stagecoach, but we do have three permanent stores on the way in. So Banning, Palm Desert, and Indio, which just opened. Indio will have an activation there the day before Stagecoach kicks off.
Okay. That's exciting, so play into that and we'll go into the numbers. Jim, we'll have you answer this one. Just increasing the TAM. You guys increased the TAM quite recently, quite a bit from $40 billion-$58 billion, so Country Lifestyle plays into that. Maybe you just talk through the numbers and how you arrived at such a large increase.
Sure. Yeah. It was the Country Lifestyle was part of that. The traditional customer of ours, the Western customer, we're seeing more of that customer out there. And then also bringing in denim into the TAM was something that was additive to that this year. And so not the entirety of mainstream denim, but as we become more and more of a denim destination, we reached out to, you know, thousands of shoppers and surveyed them and tried to get a feel for, you know, who shops us, why they shop us, what they're looking for. And this third party helped us come up with this expanded TAM.
Okay. Great. So as you play into this TAM, the store growth target has gone up as well. So I think you're around a little over 500 today and you've raised it to 1,200. So how should we think about that store growth in the coming years? And I guess what does an ideal Boot Barn store look like today?
Yeah. The ideal store is about 12,000 sq ft. Average new store volume's roughly $3.2 million. Those stores are gonna open in legacy markets in Arizona, California, Texas, as well as newer markets. We're in 49 states today. We will open stores across the country. So it's gonna be broad-based in terms of where we open those stores. We went, as we increased that store count from 900 to 1,200 CBSA by CBSA with our internal team. We also bumped it up against the TAM. We bumped it up against an additional study from a third party, and we all came to a store count very, very close to that 1,200 store number. So the TAM did not drive the 1,200 store count, but gave us additional reassurance on a number that we came up with independently, for those 1,200 stores.
But they will be across the country. They'll be in new markets in some cases, in new towns, and there'll be additional stores in cities that we are already in.
Okay.
Those stores will look very similar to the stores that we're opening today. You know, the new stores we target to have a $3.2 million sales volume. They're in a power center anchored by a Home Depot or a Lowe's or a Costco or a Walmart, somebody who's driving frequency of visit. You know, we expect those to continue to open, looking very similar to what they are today. This doesn't assume any kind of change in the sales volume, you know, going into a lower unit volume or anything like that.
Okay. That'll be roughly still maintain a mid-teens store growth rate for the foreseeable future?
Yeah, 12%-15% is what we've got for the foreseeable future.
Yeah. Okay. All right. Great. And then what's interesting to me is I live in New Jersey. I'm getting inundated now with Jersey City is opening up.
Yeah.
So you are pushing deeper into the Northeast. You're getting very close to Manhattan. How are some of these stores in the densely populated Northeast doing for you?
Yeah. So what we've really seen, as and this was part of expanding the store count to 1,200 is we've been doing really well as we've moved into urban, you know, more a little closer into an urban center, than what we were five or 10 years ago. And we're doing well in some of the more rural markets that are, you know, a regional center where folks are coming in to get their shopping done. And so, as we expand across the country and places like Jersey City, you will see us coming into more of that denser population areas. We just opened a store in Huntington Beach, this last quarter as well. That's less than a mile from the original Boot Barn store that opened up in 1978.
And that's a fairly populous center as well. So we're seeing nice success in that.
Okay. All right. I did wanna circle back around to digital because, John, you've talked about you've hired a chief digital officer, right?
Mm-hmm.
Basically sort of backfilling your previous role. So he's got some new tips and tricks. I think you started working with like TikTok shops. Maybe talk about that evolution. What are you seeing that's maybe jumping off the page for you as it relates to social media and/or TikTok shops?
Yeah. There's a couple of different themes there. One is, we are doing TikTok lives on a regular basis now. And it's very much the same story as what we talked about with exclusive brand marketing. We insisted, or I insisted, that the TikTok lives all be done in our stores, in our new store format. And those lives, while they may drive some sales, which is fine and nice, the purpose of those is to be a Trojan horse to market the stores and to get the millions of people who see those videos on TikTok, those TikTok lives to go, "Man, that is a beautiful store. I want to visit that store." So that's how we're using TikTok live itself.
When it comes to Instagram Reels or TikTok outside of the lives, I'm leaning much more into what I call everyday creators. I kind of break down the social world between professional influencers and these everyday creators. We had a couple of products go viral on TikTok, and what made them go viral was a woman sitting in her car in one case or sitting in her kitchen talking about this particular boot that we sold. It wasn't professionally produced. It wasn't with someone who does influencing for a career. And so I think the customer today, especially the younger customer, wants authenticity. They want it to be a little irreverent. They like that it is not professionally curated and edited.
And so if we look at the balance of where we're spending our time on social, I'm leaning much more into this idea of these everyday creators versus professional influencers.
Okay. All right. I wanted to get to a question to Jim. We're just around the EBIT margin expansion. So you've spoken to getting to a mid-teens EBIT margin over time. You're tracking close to roughly 13% for this current fiscal year. So, what are some of the key drivers you wanna highlight that you think will get you to that mid-teens level?
Yeah. So the guide that's currently out there for this year is 13.4% at the high end of the range. It's a nice beat in Q3. So that's helpful in marching us towards that 15%. As you look at that, we've talked about the merchandise margin. So just going down the P&L, merchandise margin, definitely a factor in that growth. We've seen the nice growth, as I mentioned, over the last seven years, and beyond. We continue to expect to see that grow and be a driver in getting us there. Somewhat offsetting that with all the new stores that we're opening, the buying and occupancy line. We have a pretty high leverage point of a seven comp roughly to leverage that.
So we'll give back some of that on the gross margin line, depending on what the top line looks like. And then continuing to see some expansion at the SG&A rate coming down with a leverage point around one and a half or two on SG&A. If we can stay in that low to mid-single digit same store sales growth, we can get some leverage there and flow that through to the operating margin. So I would say we're still probably three or four years away from getting there, depending on what the top line does. But we're making really nice progress. Wasn't that long ago that getting to a 10% operating margin was the target. And so we're really pleased with what the team's been able to do.
Okay. One question I like to ask you guys every year is, so you just did a 5.7% comp against a very tough compare. And everyone like asks me what, well, is there a denim cycle going on right now or is there a tour? I think the latest is you guys were leaning in on jeans. And so do you think there's anything in particular that's driving the business right now or do you feel like you're just, you know, you're executing well, you're culturally relevant? And like we talked about before, you're broadening the aperture of the brand.
Yeah. Of course, I think it's the latter. I think the team deserves credit, whether it be the merchandising team, the store operations team during the holiday season. I think there is not a thing I would change about our execution during the holiday season. In this particular quarter, you really saw that strength across every major merchandise category, right? I couldn't think of a time where it was more evenly spread. And denim has been doing better. And those denim silhouettes continue to be boot cut and continue to be Western inspired denim. It is not a fashion trend. And the men's and women's Western boots performed very well. Work boots performed well. It really was quite an even level of strength across the business.
You know, you look at the traffic. We now have traffic counters in our store and are able to measure traffic that will become comp this coming year. I think it is us being a lifestyle retailer, where people can come in and shop more often and you know, have a better selection, better merchandising, better customer service than others in the retail space right now.
Last question as we round out here, I wanna just talk about the economic landscape as we're getting into 2026. The tax bill that came through, you've got reduced withholdings on tips over time. We've got tax refunds, maybe some onshoring of production jobs. How do you think about the changing economic landscape, and the impact on your core customer and your business?
I think the things you just mentioned are encouraging as far as our customer goes. Our customer makes around $75,000-$80,000 of household income. What we've seen in the past with tax refunds is we've noticed a difference. If there's a delay in the tax refunds coming in, you know, we'll notice the day that they didn't get issued or they weren't deposited in accounts, and we'll see that in our comp trend, and then when they catch up, we'll see that catch up. What we haven't been able to tie directly to our sales trend would be if they get a bigger refund than they got the year before, and so it all gets kind of boiled into the stew.
And so we'll see a strong sales trend, but maybe a little harder to tie to some of the infrastructure bills or increases in tax refunds that we've seen over the past. But you're absolutely right. I mean, it should be an encouraging trend or a positive for the business if people are able to hold onto more of their money and then spend it how they please.
Okay. Great. Well, we'll wrap it up there. So John and Jim, thank you very much for taking some time and running through your business.
Absolutely. Thank you, Peter. Appreciate it.